Birthplaces of the Blues
The Texas Roots Of Ten Men Who Produced Some Of The Greatest Music Of The Twentieth Century Can Be Found In Towns With Names Like Elmo, Jewett, And Big Sandy. Come Along On A Road Trip To A Rich And Soulful Past.
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Double back on 22 through Corsicana and take Texas Highway 31 east for 23 miles to Trinidad. Get on Texas Highway 274 and head north for 24 miles to Kemp, where you’ll hit U.S. 175. Take 175 ten miles west to Kaufman, then Texas Highway 34 thirteen miles north to Terrell, where you’ll head east on U.S. 80 for about six miles to the village of Elmo, the home of one of the last living rural bluesmen. Born on July 8, 1934, on a nearby farm, Henry Qualls learned to play the guitar when he was about fifteen and was soon playing slide like Willie Johnson. By day he worked on people’s lawns; by night he played and sang at parties and picnics. He made his belated recording debut at age sixty with Blues From Elmo, Texas, singing songs by Hopkins, Johnson, Jackson, and himself in a tremulous voice and playing spirited guitar. These days Qualls occasionally plays festivals in Chicago and Europe — and house parties down the road. He lives in an old country home next to the railroad tracks not far from Aunt Kate’s Barbecue on U.S. 80. You can ask for him there. If it’s a Saturday night, you might even catch him at one of those parties, playing his Montgomery Ward Marquis through a torn Super Reverb amp accompanied by his sons. The rest of the world speeds by on 80, oblivious, which is fine with Qualls. “Either they like it or they don’t,” he says. “That’s what I do. It don’t change.”
Continue east on 80 parallel to the railroad tracks. After 26 miles, the land starts to get hilly again around Grand Saline. In Mineola, thirteen miles farther on, the soil gets red and the trees get taller and stand together in the beginning of the Piney Woods. After 23 more miles, stop in Big Sandy, a pretty little town of brick buildings and nice houses that was home to “Ragtime Texas” Henry Thomas. Born in 1874, Thomas left the family farm as a young man and became a hobo, entertaining at dances, suppers, and migrant camps and playing songs on trains for his fare. On “Railroadin’ Some” he calls out the names of stops on various lines, including some on the west-east line — “Leaving Fort Worth, Texas, rolling through Dallas … Grand Saline … Mineola … Little Sandy, Big Sandy, Texarkana” — and then he hoots like a train whistle. He probably started playing the guitar in the early 1890’s, but when the modern world caught up with and first recorded him in 1927 (there are only 23 known songs of his), he was an older man, a jukebox of turn-of-the-century American music. Thomas mixed up-tempo square-dance tunes, rags, vaudeville songs, and a handful of early blues songs (including “Bull Doze Blues,” later covered by Canned Heat and called “Goin’ Up the Country”). Unlike many rural guitar players who came later, Thomas mostly strummed chords, driving the song like an engine and only rarely fingerpicking bass notes or melodies — though he does so on his handful of blues songs, which he may have started playing in the twenties only because blues was becoming a popular genre. He also accompanied himself on the quills, a set of chirping homemade pipes that add to the charisma of his singing, hooting, and guitar playing. Nobody knows exactly how the blues began — there were no tape recorders in the 1890’s — but we can hear the form coming to life in Thomas’ music. If he is any indication, the roots of the blues are in happy music, dance music that was melodic and playful, though that may have just been Henry Thomas. He disappeared at some point — folklorist McCormick thought he might have seen him on the streets of Houston in 1949; others said he was working in the Tyler area in the fifties.
From Big Sandy take Texas Highway 155 north through Gilmer (the birthplace of electric blues great Freddie King), across Lake O’ the Pines, through the forests of loblolly pines on the other side. About five miles past the lake, take FM 161 north for about ten miles to Hughes Springs, home to Babe Karo Lemon “Black Ace” Turner, an unsung hero of the steel guitar. Born on a farm in 1905, he sang in church and played his brother’s guitar; he bought his own at age 22 and began playing dances, sometimes with guitarist Smokey Hogg. He stayed on the farm until 1935, when the Depression forced his family to scatter in search of work. Turner wound up in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he met Oscar “Buddy” Woods, who played a bottleneck slide on a steel guitar he held on his knees. The two teamed up, working at parties in the area. Soon Turner was playing a steel guitar himself, coming up with his own tunings and style. He eventually moved to Fort Worth and cut six songs for Decca; one was “Black Ace Blues.” He played it live on a local radio station, and the deejays began calling him Black Ace. He had a broad, bluesy voice and a unique steel sound — sometimes like a Dobro, sometimes like a moaning slide guitar. After serving in World War II, he picked cotton, mopped floors, and worked in a photo shop in Fort Worth, where Strachwitz found him in 1960. The giver of second chances recorded Ace in his home and released the LP — the artist’s only one — the next year. Ace died of cancer on November 7, 1972.
Go east on Texas Highway 11 for fifteen miles to Linden, the birthplace of urban blues pioneer T-Bone Walker. Take U.S. 59 south for fifteen miles to Jefferson and turn left on Texas Highway 49 downtown. Go just a few blocks, then head southeast on FM 134 for thirteen miles to Caddo Lake’s pine woods and bayous, the home of Leadbelly. The only son of hardworking farmers, he was born Huddie Ledbetter in 1888 just across the state line in Shiloh, Louisiana, a small black community. The Ledbetters moved to the Texas side, near Leigh, when Huddie was five. He grew up picking cotton, driving cows, and playing music on the Cajun accordion (or “windjammer”), guitar, mandolin, and piano. Around the Caddo Lake area, which was more than two thirds black, he heard field hollers, spirituals, English ballads, jigs, reels, vaudeville songs, and string band music. Eventually he was playing them all, and by age fifteen he was entertaining at dances (“sukey jumps”) for 50 cents a night. Ledbetter left home as a teenager and headed west, picking cotton and playing. In Dallas he hooked up with Lemon Jefferson, and the two young musicians spent months traveling, playing, drinking, and carousing. By this time Ledbetter was playing the twelve-string guitar, which would become his signature instrument, banging out bass runs and singing in a booming, confident voice. He had become an entertainer, capable of making up rhymes on the spot, changing songs to fit the audience, and adapting old folk and blues songs. Though Ledbetter could be gentle (he loved playing for children), he was a violent man, and in 1918 he was sent to prison for murder, ending up in Sugar Land; he was pardoned by Governor Pat Neff after singing songs for him when he visited the prison, including “Governor Pat Neff” (“I am your servant, composed this song/Please Governor Neff let me go back home”). Five years later Leadbelly (he probably picked up the nickname in prison) was arrested in Louisiana for attempted murder and sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he was discovered by Texas folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were in search of black rural folk music. They found the mother lode — Leadbelly, a walking encyclopedia, knew more than five hundred songs — and recorded him. After Leadbelly was released in 1934, he went to work for John Lomax, driving him through the South to record songs and even helping by showing convicts how to sing into the machine. He made commercial recordings, moved to New York, and fell in with the leftie folkies of the late thirties, including Woody Guthrie. Leadbelly recorded for various labels and the Library of Congress, doing his versions of “Irene” (later known as “Goodnight Irene,”) “The Midnight Special,” and “Rock Island Line” — songs that would always be identified with him.
Leadbelly died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on December 6, 1949, and was returned to Caddo Lake, to the graveyard of the Shiloh Baptist Church. To get there, take 134 south to Leigh, then FM 1999 east five miles to the Louisiana border. Continue on 1999 for about two miles — the church is on your right. In the mid-seventies the head of the Harrison County Historical Survey Committee said that the remains of Leadbelly, “one of Texas’ truly great musicians,” should be returned to the state where he grew up; Caddo Parish demurred. It wouldn’t be the last time Texans claimed Leadbelly as one of their own.
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